Bill Urges Overhaul Of CRRA To Focus On Recycling Rather Than Burning Trash For Energy

Legislation proposed Friday by Gov. Dannel P. Malloy would overhaul the troubled Connecticut Resources Recovery Authority into a leaner agency concerned more with recycling the state's trash than with burning it for energy.

As the budget for the quasi-public agency faces multimillion-dollar deficits in the next three years, task force reports and panel findings have streamed in during the past two years, leading to piles of recommendations and the bill offered Friday.

The proposed overhaul comes at an important juncture for solid waste management in Connecticut, which for decades has relied heavily on the state's numerous trash-to-energy plants. The largest of those facilities, in Hartford, is struggling to make ends meet because its lucrative long-term electricity contracts have come to an end, forcing it to sell its power on the wholesale market at lower prices.

The governor's bill calls for material waste companies to bid on ways to redevelop the Hartford plant for other uses, including recycling, reuse, organic materials processing or trash-to-energy.

The measure would rename the agency the "Materials Innovation and Recycling Authority," lower its cap on staffing from 70 to 45 employees, and expand the state's recycling goal to 60 percent by 2024 from the current goal of 56 percent by then. The state currently recycles less than 30 percent of its material waste.

It also calls for a new state plan for solid waste management by 2016 and would create a nonprofit group to promote recycling research and advocacy.

Macky McCleary, deputy commissioner for the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, said that the Malloy administration is at a point where it needs creative solutions for how to handle its waste. The hope, he said, is for "the type of forward-thinking solution that CRRA was 40 years ago," when the state was largely dependent on landfills.

When the trash agency proposed its own transition plan in December, McCleary said, he and other policymakers were disappointed with how it primarily sought to balance the organization's budget and ensure near-term stability.

"We want to think of the future," McCleary said, "not the status quo in perpetuity."

The governor's bill was submitted on his behalf by the legislature's top four Democratic lawmakers — Senate President Donald E. Williams, Senate Majority Leader Martin M. Looney, House Speaker J. Brendan Sharkey and House Majority Leader Joe Aresomiwicz.

A spokesman for the Connecticut Resources Recovery Authority had no comment on the proposed legislation, which he said was still being reviewed by management.

Richard J. Barlow, a member of the authority's board and first selectman of Canton, said that the legislation addresses concerns already raised by the agency.

"In terms of what the long-term goals are, I don't see anything that hasn't been actively talked about," Barlow said. "There is a need to advance the solid waste management system in Connecticut beyond the existing levels of recycling and recovery."

The need for new ways to handle the state's trash has been known for years, and so far several fixes have been proposed for the agency, from having the state buy the power from the plant at a mutually beneficial price to letting the power qualify for the higher renewable power subsidy that is reserved for solar and wind facilities.

Ultimately, though, legislation required an audit of the trash agency's operations and a transition plan from the authority.

The audit found that the authority's revenue sources were less diversified than those of its competitors, which had expanded into organic waste recycling and municipal power contracting. The competitors — Wheelabrator Technologies and Covanta Energy — said in the audit that they believed that the Hartford facility was running in the red and indicated that they would not be interested in taking it over.

The audit also discovered that the agency's large staff was paid more than the staff of its peers. Top managers have higher average base salaries than those at similar utilities and waste firms, with more than a third of its 45 employees making between $101,000 and $292,000, the audit said. The claim led the authority to launch a compensation review of its own.

In its transition plan to keep the Hartford facility operating in the near-term future, the CRRA proposed in December a salary freeze to save $1.5 million over five years, a $17.5 million round of bonding, a $700,000 reduction in its payments in lieu of taxes to Hartford, a $200,000 reduction in operating expenses, use of a prior $1 million surplus and $3 million from its reserve funds.